Sankofa is
an Akan word that means, "We must go back and
reclaim our past so we can move forward; so we understand why and how we came
to be who we are today." Written, directed and produced by Ethiopian-born
filmmaker HaileGerima, Sankofa is a
powerful film about Maafa--the African holocaust. Done from an
African/African-American perspective, this story is a vastly different one from
the generally distorted representations of African people that Hollywood gives us. This revolutionary feature film
connects enslaved black people with their African past and culture. It empowers
Black people on the screen by showing how African peoples desire for freedommade them resist, fight back, and conspire against
their enslavers, overseers and collective past through the vision on Mona, who
visits her ancestral experience on a new world plantation as Shola. We share the life she endures as a slave and
experiences her growing consciousness and transformation.

--Mypheduh Films

THE MAKING OF THE FILM:

To complete their magnificent movie
on slavery--which was filmed at the former slave castles in Cape Coast, Ghana--ShirikianaAina and her husband, HaileGerima, pleaded for
foundation grants, bartered for plane tickets, lodging and crew, and charged
supplies on their credit cards.They
finished the film, Sankofa (which means "going
backward to move forward" in Akan, a Ghanaian
dialect), last year for less than $1 million. That challenge ended up being the
easy part. After endless showings at film festivals around the world, the
producers couldn't get a distribution deal and were in debt. So Aina and Gerima, who are also
professors at HowardUniversity in Washington, D.C., distributed the film themselves, which to date has grossed more than
$670,000. [Note:by the end of 1997 the
film had grossed close to $3 million.]Here's how they did it:

MAKING THE MOVIE :"We applied for every film grant from
organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller
Foundation, the Pittsburgh Foundation. We then approached the Ghanaian
government about filming in their country. They allowed us to do it in exchange
for lifetime rights to show the film in Ghana. Also, the Fespaco
Film Festival in Burkina Faso gave us film equipment and personnel." SEEKING DISTRIBUTION: "Film festival after festival, the results were the same. No one
would pick up our film. We then arranged private screenings for all the major
studios to see the film, and they all told us the same thing: 'we don't know
how to market your film.'

"RISING TO THE TOP ":Out of desperation, we organized a screening
for the community people in Washington,
D.C. One of the attendees, Acklyn
Lynch, a professor at the University of Maryland, BaltimoreCounty, then helped us throw a fund-raising
premiere at the Cineplex Odeon Jenifertheater in Washington, which raised $20,000 and allowed the film
to run there for 11 weeks. We then made copies of the film and now continue to
rent theaters across the country. In August, Sankofa
will be running in Philadelphia, Newark, Chicago and Atlanta."

--Deborah
Gregory, Essence, Sept. 1994

FILM AND FILMMAKER:

From: Black Film Review, 1994, Vol. 8 Issue 13

A RETURN TO THE PAST

Earlier this year,Sankofa won a
jury prize for cinematography at the Festival of Pan African Cinema and
Television.For the movie, Gerima used a narrative style that occasionally borrows
from the documentary genre. Tony Stafford, film executive, has said that Gerima's work "smash(es) the tenets of polite naturalism... [and]
eschews traditional genre distinctions between fiction and documentary."
Ironically, given the enduring popularity of Hollywood's New-Jack-Boyz-N-the-City-Menacing-Society
genre, which uses a pseudo-documentary filmic style, movies like Sankofa are at
risk of being overshadowed.

As much as the Video Soul X Generation
may hate to admit it, history has taught that there is much to be learned from
the past. Not just the glory years everyone likes to romanticize about. You
know, the noble days when everyone and his neighbor was a king or queen. Or the
radical 60s when everybody had a shotgun, a beret, and a
leather jacket, and marched in the streets with Huey. I mean those in
between years. Those years, those hundreds of thousands of
years that fell somewhere between the Nile and Newton. It's important to learn from these years as
well, and not just for what they can teach about the past, but also for what
they can teach about the present.

One might consider these points
while viewing HaileGerima's
latest feature length film, Sankofa. The theme of returning home is a recurrent one in Gerima's films, particularly this one. "Sankofa" is an Akan word
that means "to return to the past in order to go forward." Told from
the perspective of a Eurocentric Black woman condemned to re-live slavery, the
film is a story about self awareness and a journey home in search of
pan-African consciousness.

Early in the film it becomes clear
that Gerima, who is Ethiopian, is employing a
familiar genre--the slave drama--to subvert conventional assumptions about
identity, race, and class within our own society.Gerima, who wrote,
directed, and co-produced Sankofa with ShirikianaAina, agrees the film is less about slavery, per se, than a
commentary on contemporary sociopolitical dynamics. He says he wanted to use
“slavery as a landscape" to bring into sharper focus the issues African
Americans need to address today. "I see the contemporary echoes of the
past," he says. "If you look at America as a plantation, then you can codify the
different classes and interest groups within the society. You find overseers,
head slaves, you find plantation owners in a very advanced, sophisticated way.
This is why I felt I had to do the film. I was not interested in the past
because it was exotic or brutal. I was very interested in its relationship to
the present.

"I think the role of the
artist," Gerima says, "is to interpret
those realities--in a very, very sensitive and unique way--that daily re-visit
a certain society." Gerima charges that Hollywood industry movies, particularly ghetto
gangster films, "de-focus our mental consciousness, "make Blacks feel
hopeless, and do little more than show "accurately how someone got
brutally killed." Industry-backed films, he says, fail to offer artistic
interpretations that would "[invigorate] society and make people talk and
think like they never have before."

Gerima
says he made Sankofa
to raise consciousness; the movie isn't a couch potato's silver screen T.V.
substitute. "I am not a court jester; I'm not out to entertain
people," says Gerima. "I don't degrade
myself by telling you I made Sankofa to entertain you. I made it to make you think."
Gerima characterizes Hollywood as being more interested in bread and
chocolate issues than bread and butter ones--that is, more interested in
profits than people--and he criticizes the industry for being detrimental to
Black struggles for freedom. Black audiences, he says, cannot rely on the
industry to provide them with empowering images designed to raise
consciousness. Gerima points out that
most Hollywood movies, whose primary purpose is to make profits by entertaining, depress
consciousness. "The motivating factor," he says, "determines the
type of films they are. The fact that those industry films are done for
commercial reasons automatically dismisses any possibility of arriving at a
higher consciousness as a result of witnessing [them]."

It's no revelation that those with
the greatest economic interestdetermine what scripts get produced
and distributed, and who gets to make them. Robert Staples has estimated that
Blacks, and other people of color, buy 38 percent of all movie tickets and that
97 percent of entertainment profits go to European-Americans. In a 1991 study,
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) found
that, "No Black executive makes final decisions in the motion picture or
television industry, [and] only a handful of Afro-Americans hold executive
positions with film studios or television networks."

Gerima
also charges that Hollywood suppresses indigenous debate within Black communities and he indicts
the industry for selecting cultural representatives who don't challenge the
status quo. These Hollywood approved screenwriters and directors, he says, make movies that are
ultimately marketed as "the Black reality."

"I think the industry backs
young people who are not the real intellectual, cultural, artistic products of
the Black community. The Black community has always had a conflict,
historically, as I observe it, [where] white America intervenes and recruits their own guards.
But there have always been Black Americans in [the arts] that are nurtured by
the community. And the industry is incapable of allowing those artistic,
intellectual sensitivities emerge to help the society to transform. What they
do is pre-empt those local, nurtured African Americans and bring in their own
version. They do the same with Black leadership and they do in the artistic
world."

The films these movie marionettes
make, Gerima says, perpetuate the same Tom n' Jemima
stereotypes Hollywood has produced in the past. The only
difference today is Black directors have been hired to add a little masala to the mix. Gerima says
that, "Industry-backed African-American films are nothing but tour guides
for the non-resident Black bourgeoisie and white Americans to visit the
`terrible' Black community."

Clearly, Gerima
intends for Sankofa
to expand the boundaries of Black representation in ways that include more
diverse, realistic, and empowering images and, in turn, enable Black audiences
to see themselves in new ways that are divorced from dominant images.

Gerima
reminds one of a street corner minister preaching the gospel to passersby and
possible converts. His arguments are not without merit. But without a
congregation, a regular pulpit, and, lord knows, a collection plate or two--in
short, without the institutional support needed to spread his message to a
wider audience--his converts will be few. Gerima
himself knows this. Therefore it should not be surprising that he advocates the
re-creation of an independent Black film industry.For although Gerima
doesn't believe Hollywood-made movies can challenge us to re-think power
relations, he says he doesn't believe the industry and "the system"
are omnipotent. Rather, he places the responsibility for recuperating Black
images where he says it belongs: in the Black community.

Some critics have argued that it is
necessary to have both independent Black cinema and Hollywood insiders, but Gerima
says industry-made movies will forever be compromised in ways that betray our
history and identities. The only alternative, he says, is to create an
alternative film culture which allows us to reconstruct our image of ourselves
and our relationships to one another. This alternative film culture, Gerima says, could help us to transform ourselves and
re-work power relations within the society.

Not that we didn't have an
independent film industry before. Recalling

an earlier period, Gerima
points out that African Americans allowed Hollywood to suck the life out of the Black independent
film industry of the 1920s/1930s. By this time Black theater owners and
filmmakers, notably Oscar Micheaux, had built a
successful industry that was fueled and supported by Black actors, businessmen,
newspaper critics, and audiences. But once Hollywood realized there was a growing audience of
Black moviegoers, particularly in Northern industrial cities, it started
including Black actors as extras and supporting characters in its films.Segregation laws were relaxed somewhat, thus
allowing Blacks to attend theaters that had previously catered only to whites.
Audiences and actors alike abandoned this independent cinema to participate in
the dominant film culture.

Now the situation is reversed. Hollywood rediscovered Black people in the mid-1980s,
and since then it has built up a sizable Black audience that will turn out for
any Spike Joint or ghetto vehicle released.Gerima is advocating that contemporary
independent filmmakers "recapture" this Black audience that has been
nursed on Hollywood's ocular junk food, and nourish it with a
new film culture.

Before we can accomplish this, he
says, we must divest ourselves from the cinematic standards that have been set
by Hollywood. As movie audiences we have grown accustomed
to the dazzling, and expensive, film audiences we have grown accustomed to the
dazzling, and expensive, film sets and special effects that come with million dollar, big studio productions. Similarly, we have bought
into the star crazy mentality which uses big name individuals to draw ticket
buyers to the box office. Gerima says these are among
the superfluous frills we must abandon if we are to develop an alternative
African American film culture. "We have to build up independent
institutions, however modest and small they are," Gerima
says, "and build them--forever--without any doubt that they are
legitimate. We could build an amazing culture of (film) production outside the
existing system if we wisely invest in each others' dreams and visions."

Specifically, what Gerima is calling for is a low budget film culture that is
informed by minimalism. For example, during the making of Sankofa, when he realized
additional money would not be forthcoming, Gerima
couldn't pay his film crew the wages he wanted, couldn't employ certain color
dissolves and special effects, and an entire section of the film had to be cut.
He also had enough money to make only one print of the film. Despite these
sacrifices, Sankofa,
and other low budget films, demonstrate that it is possible to abandon the
slick, glossy Hollywood aesthetic in favor of one that speaks more directly to
the needs of Black people.

African Americans would embrace such a film culture, Gerima says, if mobilized by our
cultural and political leadership. "When a film comes out (critics) are
there to review the film. Very sad, because to me (the
critics') role should always be on a continual basis.People
who write about film should always be there, alert, activating the
community--even in the absence of films. It is the making of a movie, creating the
conditions to have more movies being made within the Black community,
that makes the community be activated. Similarly, organizations like the
NAACP, instead of begging Hollywood, could do fundraising for Black artists in the Black community.
Instead of marching, they could put their money in Black films."

For Gerima,Sankofa--which
he considers to be "a turning point and an amalgamation" of
everything he has done to date--represents his own consciousness raising
experiences and "homecoming." The son of an insurgent Ethiopian
playwright, Gerima did a stint in the Peace Corps,
which he calls his period of ,(volunteer
colonialism," before coming to the U.S. in the late 1960s. He says he was influenced
by the radical, militant African American culture he found when he arrived, and
was deeply influenced by the Black arts movement that was afoot at the
time."It was the best time,
historically, for me to have come to America," he says. "The Black movement
engulfed me and hi-jacked me out of my submissive colonial position. Out of
that I developed [the themeof] `the return,' the 'journey.' So, all of my films are about
returning. I am deeply indebted to this period of Black American history."

He carried this radical sentiment
into UCLA, where, as a film student, he began researching and writing Sankofa. Throughout the 70s and early 80s Gerima wrote (and rewrote) the script, and traveled to the
southern U.S., Venezuela, Martinique, Cuba, and Jamaica to learn about American slavery. In 1985 he
began raising money to produce the film, which he completed last year.

Thus far, Sankofa--Gerima's
eighth feature length film--has been shown in Germany, Italy, Burkina Faso, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. By the end of this year, Gerima plans to show
it in Ghana, South Africa, Tunisia and Los Angeles (again.) Hopefully, when another print of
the movie is made, it will circulate to more cities and audiences. Until then, Gerima is entering Sankofa in
selected film festivals around the world and is distributing the movie to local
markets himself. Not surprisingly, all the major U.S. film distribution
companies have labeled Sankofa a "Black
history" or "Black culture" movie--which they apparently
consider to be stigmas--and have refused to distribute it.

Interestingly, white Americans in
the Hollywood film industry establishment appear to be
alone in this assessment of Sankofa. White audiences in Europe have appreciated the film and found it to be
relevant to their lives. For example, German audiences have discovered that
African American slavery is a fitting metaphor for other institutions and
patterns of behavior based on oppression. Because of Sankofa's strong themes of
identity, resistance, and struggle, Germans are using the film as a point of
departure for debates on ethnic

relations there.

Finally, and perhaps more important
to Gerima, people of African descent also are
claiming the film. Gerima was moved to tears as he
recounted stories of how Black people were embracing the film. For example, after
a screening of Sankofa in Ouagadougou [Burkina Faso], several Black audience members sent him a
taped message telling him how much the movie meant to them. A preview screening
of a draft version of the movie elicited a similar response from a predominantly
Black audience at SyracuseUniversity. And Gerima's film
crew told him, after he apologized for not being able to pay them more than he
did, that simply working on Sankofa and learning more about African and African American
history was payment enough.

Gerima
says the approximate 20 years it took to make Sankofa, with the resulting
struggle and sacrifice, would not have been worth it, "if there hadn't
been a community of people who said, "Okay, you made this film. You
brought it here and from here we will take it." Things like this make you
say, "I'll make my next film, too. I'll regroup." What makes you want
to make another film is the way [your films] materialize
at the end. The feedback, the embracing is what repairs you."